okk, after several years I've come to the conclusion that to really help out in the community, I need to pick a couple of projects and put my energy into those, rather than trying to support everything. I figure it's better to give 5 hours a week to one project than 1 hour a week to 5 projects. I've picked a couple of projects that I'm currently putting most of my support effort into.

X.org - Linux's (and other's) windowing system. Too few people work on something that so many people use and depend on and complain about.

Package managers, packaging systems. Linux has a ridiculous number of packaging systems and such. I think package managers are the Linux equivalent of hello-world programs. Everyone feels the need to write one. I'm actually tired of all the package managers. Some have features the others don't, but instead of helping the linux world, I think they split resources and retard progress. People are still talking about what the backend database should look like or if there should be one, how it handles dependencies, ... There's no polite way to say this so I'll just say it. I think people who write new package managers are idiots. Now don't confuse that with people who do it to learn what's going on. It's always good to disect things. But we already have > 10 packaging systems and ~20 package managers. Learn, experiment, but then take that knowledge and improve and existing system. If you don't, you're an idiot. Packaging fragmentation forces distros to duplicate efforts _NEEDLESSLY_. If you're a packager for a distro and you think you're helping because you're doing that grunt work, then you're an idiot. Packagers are needed and important but mainly because with 20 packaging systems, we need 20 people doing the exact same job.